About Me

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Build-a-bed 4 (Drama)

The Drama of it all!! (sorry, no pics)

It's
been a while. We have been sleeping on our bed for about a month and still have
to find a solution to the hanging storage, 4th Malm, and fold-away ladder. I
was hoping that the "good" readers of Ikeahackers would be a little
more forgiving than to question why we built the structure in the first place,
but I guess I give internet people too much credit. Read the other 3 parts, people!

Construction

So
in Part 2 I mentioned that drilling the holes for the head and foot boards took
about 4 hours. Ridiculous, you say? You're telling me!

Back
when I lived with my parents, my father was a bit of a miser when it came to
sharing things (see Freak of Womanhood), so I bought myself my own cordless
power drill. It requires charging and doesn't get used very often. You do the
math... Anyway, we plug it in and start looking for the drill bits...which we
can't find. Of course!

So
we call up a friend who borrowed the drill just to make sure that he didn't
still have them on accident. He didn't. Another (probably) hour and a half goes
by, and we find them, finally.

Now,
back to the drill we had. It can be used while charging but doesn't really have
a lot of torque. Of course it doesn't! So, I suggest that we go borrow a drill
from one of our neighbors (who has an incredible tool shed) in the meantime. He
is generous enough to indulge our request, and just to add icing, offers to let
us borrow a drill bit.

His
drill was obviously powerful enough to bore through the pine without a second
thought except the drill bit he let us borrow was no longer sharp. By this
time, we are a good hour invested into this drill thing. So, my dear, sweet,
loving B-chan decides to switch the dull drill bit with mine (that we
eventually found). However, while pondering over what and how to do things he
absent-mindedly pulls the drill trigger multiple times for a drill with an
already low battery. Once we get everything ready to get back to drilling the
pine, the battery dies. Good times!

Of
course the part of our neighbor's drill that controls getting the drill bit in
and out only works when the drill has power. Of course! And of course when the
drill runs out of power, our neighbor is gone, so we can't plug it in or get
the good drill bit out. Of course!

By
this time, we are both frustrated, time is running out for assembling the bed
before bedtime, we have a child to feed and nap, and no working drill.

Like
I said, good times!! Oh, the horror, you say? Whatever did you do, you
say? Solution: Go raid daddy's tool shed!

While
the B-chan stayed with said napping child and figured out a plan of action, I
had to go hunt down a working drill so that we could have somewhere to sleep.

As
mentioned before, my father had his own extensive tool shed (and by extensive,
I mean at least 2 if not 3 or four of everything). So, our last resort was to
go borrow a corded drill, since the cordless ones were obviously causing more
problems than anything. That of course required digging through the "tool
shed," a 1988 GMC Safari with 2 broken door handles and a driver's side
overgrown with bouganvilla (think thorns).

The
only way in was through the back doors which were right up against a pile of
stuff.

One
eensie-weensie little detail I may have forgotten to mention... I'm preggers,
too.

I
dutifully climbed onto the back bumper, opened the back doors, and crawled into
the van crammed with my father's stuff. The problem was that I had to heft
heavy things around with very little space while hunched over (because I am on
the tall side). Finally, I found the drill I was looking for, and just for good
measure, I took one of the old kind (that requires elbow grease not
electricity), too. Since I was in there, I figured that I would take some other
tools we might need, like the circular saw, a million drill bits and some other
odds and ends. Raiding the tool shed alone probably took at least an hour.
Again, you do the math.

Finally,
I made it back home with the tools. By that time, the child was awake and
required attention, and B-chan was on his own to finish the drilling.

We
worked late into the night, but finally got the basic bed structure done. So,
for all you overly critical Ikeahacker readers, blah blah blah!!!

Posting

By
posting on IkeaHackers, I really just wanted to show people how we did what we
did. I didn’t expect to win any awards, but I didn’t expect people to be so
critical, either. Case in point:

Having read what's
written here and took a good long look at the info on your blog I still have no
sense of what you built and why you built it. Seriously, the more I look at
this the more confusing it becomes. Numerous pictures of the finished product might
help.

This
comment makes me wonder if this person even followed the links to the other
posts in which I say that the project is unfinished and the tutorial is for the
basic structure. Mostly, submitting the tutorial is a way to get traffic for
the blog. The IkeaHacker editor obviously liked it, I guess that should be
enough.

For
all you critical people out there, yes, I will post pictures of the finished
product. You could at least say something like "that's an interesting
solution" if you didn’t like it. No one is forcing you to build one.

Suffice
it to say, I am proud of what we did, even if it is not done, not elegant, or
more effort than it should have been. I am the one using it, and it works.

Still not done?!

No, we are still not done. That's why it's a Saga! We knew this going into the project. The idea of building this bed during the Thanksgiving break was so that I could help before I got too pregnant. There are some parts still missing and some solutions not found. So stay tuned for Episode 5, in which I will post pictures of the actual finished project, hanging storage, ladder, and all. But be warned, it may take a while.